"You don’t really know what you have.”

Two VERY DIFFERENT poems by Dane Cervine

It might seem that, other than a shared author in Dane Cervine, the poems “The Blue Horse” and “The Jeweled Net of Indra” have little in common—and that’s certainly true if you are looking at such concerns of poetry as form, diction, style, and even subject matter.

But then there is this: viewed side by side, they also provide something of a workshop in the ways each poem finds its proper form, and in the surprises that can result when a poet steps away from his or her accustomed literary landscape.

In the case of “The Blue Horse,” that meant that Cervine was left wondering what the “scrawled lines” sparked by a family photo he happened across really amounted to.

“One of the questions that evolved was, do I actually have something?” he said.

One answer to that question came when the poem—a last minute addition to his submission—won the prestigious Atlanta Review Prize in 2013.

Similarly, “The Jeweled Net of Indra” was so different from his usual work that he didn’t even show it to his regular writers’ group for their comments and suggestions.

“I didn’t want the group to mess with it,” he said. “I just wanted to put it out there.”

When he did that, it became the winning poem in the 2005 National Writers Union contest, chosen by Adrianne Rich.

So, let’s take a look at the poems, and then backtrack a bit to learn how each one was written.

The Blue Horse

My mother wakes me at 3am, hands me a flashlight.
I put on old shoes, a jacket, follow her
to the barn where my father is already
kneeling by the white mare. Her eyes
are wild, her breath filling the cold air
with steam. But her muscled flanks
and immense torso know how to do this:
birth the impossible, life
from almost nothing. One egg,
one sperm, small as a thought,
an instinct, a desire. I had wanted
to see this, said, Wake me
no matter what. And here it is,
the new foal, impossibly folded
emerging from the mare in a blue silky sack,
as though brought here from deep under water
or an incomprehensibly distant star.
I stare like a virgin. This
a second birth, my own
vanished into bone memory.
But this horse: a kind of god.
In the dead of night,
I kneel in dirt,
watch his mother lick
the liquid sea from his fur,
nudge him to wobbly knees,
watch him stand.

—Winner of the Atlanta Review 2013 prize, chosen by Dan Veach. Published after in the book Kung Fu of the Dark Father (Plain View Press).

As you might imagine, “The Blue Horse” is a more or less straightforward account of a boyhood memory. But it was only when he had children of his own—and, consequently, an emerging interest in “family inquiry”—that the memory returned to the fore.

That happened one morning when he was looking through some old family photos, his children, still young at the time, playing nearby. One photo—of his sister with a horse—sparked a “visceral memory,” he said.

The memory was of a time when Cervine was still a teenager and his family had boarded a friend’s horse for a couple of weeks (they had horses of their own as well), not knowing at first that the visiting mare was pregnant. Not long afterwards, the entire family was awakened one night to witness the miracle of birth.

Years later, the photograph from that night brought back a rush of vivid memories for Cervine, now a widely published poet, author of a number of books, and the recipient of prestigious literary awards (see his bio, below).

“And I scrawled it out just to capture the memory itself,” he said.

Many of the images—“. . . her muscled flanks/and enormous torso . . . “—were “partly in the original version,” he said, “and I was so struck by the ‘blue silky sack.’”

But that’s where the poet’s craft—twinned with Cervine’s longstanding meditation practice—allowed him to go deeper into the images, to write such evocative lines as “. . . this/a second birth, my own/vanished into bone memory./But this horse: a kind of god.”

Even so, he had his doubts about sending the poem to the highly competitive contest at the Atlanta Review, he said.

“I’m not really sure why I sent it. It wasn’t faith in the poem, really, but I liked it.

“Part of the magic for an author,” Cervine concluded, “is you don’t really know what you have.”

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And here’s “The Jeweled Net of Indra,” read by the author; text follows.

The Jeweled Net of Indra

Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology—
Indra’s net, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting
every other facet of every other jewel, infinitely. Suddenly, I see
the hands that paint the white lines, that lay the black asphalt,
hands of a man joyous or lost soap-scrubbing his body clean
for dinner and beer, for the wife who loves him, hands that hold
their tickets for London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking
pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble
when the Nazi bombing relented—and if not for that war,
would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio
recount the birth of the child named Tsunami after the storm
that drove her mother into the hills, would the meager dollars
I send to rebuild a village—minted with the Rosicrucian-eye
above the pyramid dreamed by this country’s founders
as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls
that we don’t know about—would I have known to send it,
if not for the hands that flew the kite that drew electricity
from the skies that made its way into the flat-screened box
that unveils this jewel-linked world twenty-four hours of every
gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes
made by hands in China nimbly sewing a dream of Hollywood
and iPod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future—
while the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needle
drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the icecaps that melt
into sea that shifts the current that loves the wind that swirls
from heaven to earth stirring one storm after another, blowing
its diaphanous passion over New Orleans like a trumpet sinking
the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure
for what burns—this illusion that anyone stands alone—stranded
on the roofs of our swollen houses mouthing save me to a world
whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough
to finally hear, or flick with a single click the entire interconnected
vision of it all off.


—Winner of a National Writers Union contest (2005), chosen by Adrienne Rich and subsequently published in Poetry Flash, The SUN Magazine, and the book The Jeweled Net of Indra (Plain View Press)

--Dane Cervine

There is a sense in which “The Jeweled Net of Indra” is an experiment, one influenced by Cervine’s then-teenaged son who had himself plunged into the world of slam or spoken word poetry, a form and language the father hadn’t explored.

But first there was the “spontaneous mystical experience” that caused Cervine to pull off a busy California freeway to chase after “the flood of words” that had arrived unexpectedly as he was driving.

“I just kind of transcribed it,” he said.

Cervine, a therapist, was on his way home from a professional meeting at which the participants were assessing the connections (and connectedness) among the various specialties and organizations serving children and youth. That, and the meditative effect of the yellow lines rushing by him on Highway 80, may have nudged him toward thoughts about the interconnectedness of all things that is at the heart of “The Jeweled Net of Indra.”

However it happened, “My challenge was to take notes, and later to type them up. I added some [images], but not a lot,” he said.

“In some instances, I jotted down the images, then added in the grammar later.”

And those images—as varied as they are—were the ones he was given when the poem struck. From the Indian goddess’s jeweled net to the road workers, the tickets to London and “hands in China nimbly sewing” to, ultimately, “this illusion that anyone stands alone,” they were just a part of the metaphorical mesh Cervine saw that day.

“I didn’t go looking them up; they were already in my mind,” he said.

Even the appearance of the poem on the page reinforces the interconnections the poem insists upon, he said. “The original ‘block poem’ structure felt like a net or a blanket.”

In each of its facets, Cervine’s poem hews closely to the well-known Buddhist metaphor of the Vedic deity Indra’s jeweled net, in which each of an infinite number of jewels reflects each and all of the others, an illustration of the ways in which “everything contains everything else.” in the words of Zen Buddhism scholar Barbara O’Brien.

That’s a concept that resonates with Cervine, who says he brings three “identities” to his creative work: the therapist and the poet, of course, but also a third one that grows out of a lifelong interest in the spiritual.

“We can be part of this jeweled net,” he said.

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Dane Cervine’s new book of prose poems is, The World Is God's Language, published by Sixteen Rivers Press (2021). Recent books include Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword, from Saddle Road Press in Hawaii, a cross-genre work of Zen koan & prose poems. Previous poetry books include Kung Fu of the Dark Father, How Therapists Dance, The Jeweled Net of Indra, and What a Father Dreams. Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for a Pushcart. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Visit his website here.

Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California—where he works as a therapist, and is the emeritus Chief of Children’s Mental Health for the county. His work integrates the arts of therapy and writing with a long-standing meditation practice.